I had a similar problem with Simutronics, when I was test-driving Gemstone 3. I played the game once, despised the interface, and didn't bother to come back.
At least once a month, for three months, I received an e-mail from Simutronics, advertising AT&T and another of their games. There was a remove-from-list link at the bottom of the e-mail, which I always clicked on, to no avail. I ranted and threatened, to no avail. Luckily, the fools had left the brass' e-mail addresses stashed away on their company web-pages... so I e-mailed the head of their Marketing department, explaining exactly why I would never play another Simutronics game, use an AT&T service, and encourage everyone that I met to do the same.
Within three days, he confirmed that I was off the list.
With an outfit like Amazon, your best bet is to get an e-mail program that can handle filters. Just set it up to delete anything that comes down the pipe from Amazon, and you're all set-- until your friends sign up for their AmazonMail e-mail addresses.
If the seller "politely declines" to sell me a computer without an OS, I politely decline to purchase a computer with a hard drive.
Seriously speaking, though, I've gone through enough shitty pre-built machines that I only purchase parts piecemeal. A mobo here, a case there... and a brand-spanking-new HD that came directly from the wholesaler to me, shrink-wrapped and all.
Who could forget AstroTit, in all its CGA glory? The AIDS virii were my favourite enemy, although the giant bibles were entertaining as well.
I found my old copy a while ago, but I'm afraid that it doesn't run very well on a Celery 466...
That reminds me-- a friend of mine was e-mailing copies of Sextris (Tetris, only the bricks are people in odd positions-- you get the idea) to friends and relatives. Nothing unusual about that of course, crudity being one of e-mail's primary purposes. The funny thing in this case, was that the damn thing had been infected by a virus (Green Caterpillar, I think-- he's had recurring problems with that one for close to ten years now); we're still trying to decide if it was sexually transmitted or not. Of course, now he surfs for pr0n with a condom pulled over his cable modem, just in case.
Actually, something like that happened to me, once. I was visiting friends, sitting on their futon, and playing Legend of Legaia. I'm in the habit of holding the controller with one hand during disc access, so that I can eat or drink with the other.
In this case, I was eating a Pogo, when my group was attacked. Now, for those of you who don't know, the opening of a combat sequence in LoL causes force-feedback joysticks to shake like a rat in a terrier's jaws. Of course, I've got the Pogo in my mouth, and the Dual Shock controller leaps out of my hand... directly into my lap. The sensation was quite different than what I had come to expect from using a Playstation. Luckily (or not), I haven't had a similar experience with a Dual-Shock controller since.
Libertarian? Me? Uh, no. Please stop making such unfounded assumptions, based on the fact that I post on Slashdot.
Prove to me that spam does anything beyond annoying the recipient. I have informed several otherwise "legitimate" companies that that their incessant unsolicited e-mails have caused me to boycott their products, and to encourage everyone that I meet to do so as well.
Demographic profiling? Please-- I receive at least five "spam" e-mails per day, detailing how I can "now accept credit cards". I don't run a business. I have never ran a business. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be dealing with an organization that relied upon a fly-by-night mass-emailing company to advertise themselves.
Define "new", as in "spam is simply a derogatory term for a new form of advertising". I've been running into spam for a number of years now, and especially when one thinks in terms of "internet time", spam is by no means new.
If spammers of all sorts were seriously interested in legitimizing their "business", all advertising or soliciting messages would be preceded by an "ADV:" marker. Likewise, all spam would have a functional opt-out link embedded somewhere within the message. Your claims of "demographic profiling" are laughable-- the vast majority of mass e-mailers utilize hacked and/or harvested e-mail addresses. When I receive a message that is sent to j*@home.com, I'd say that it's abundantly clear that the sender has no interest in my demographic profile.
Granted, there are similarities to accepted unsolicited mass-contact schemes, such as "junk" mail and telemarketing-- both of which are generally reviled, I might add. The difference in this case, is that junk e-mail takes up precious space on mail-servers; unlike the post office or the phone company, ISPs are not being paid for this abuse of their services and hardware.
You want people to accept spam? Legitimize it first-- make the spammers accountable.
In passing, please be careful with your gross over-generalizations. I do not operate within your "capitalist economy", nor do others who post on or read Slashdot. Complaining about spam does not make me a hypocrite.
Jesus H. Xrist, that's fugging insane. Not only does it send these spams out, it tries to pass itself off as the sender-- bloody wonderful.
If my friends want me to try MSN Explorer, they can tell me to my face. That way I can laugh in theirs immediately afterwards.
I cannot believe that these idiots are trying to claim that it isn't spam. It's auto-generated; it's ad-copy; and it's offensive to one's intelligence. What's next-- a.sig that reads "This e-mail generated by Outlook Express. Click "here" for details"?
I've heard rumours that the new Metroid is supposed to played from a first-person perspective. I can't speak for anyone else, but something that amounts to a Samus Quake mod just doesn't float my boat.
They're using some sort of mini-CD, to reduce the odds of piracy. While that's a vaguely intelligent idea, they're also using a flip-top insertion design-- considering that this thing's designed for kids, and has a handle on the back (making it look like a lunchpail), I can guarantee that the CD lid will be the first thing broken.
The last I heard, this thing was 4x4x6-- it's frigging tiny. No word on the size of the (Fisher-Price inspired) controller-- which seems to be designed not to fit in an adult hand properly.
Personally, I'd have used a front-loading CD-cartridge design, myself. If they're intending for the user to truck it around wherever, that flip-top is a damn bad idea.
And why on Bob's green earth is the damn thing so fugly?
Any console that tries to pull something like this off is going to require a keyboard. Not that that's much of a problem-- the DC already has one (AFAIK), and I can guarantee that there will be one for the PSX2 sometime next year.
I'm not particularly excited about the idea of "real time translation" between "x" languages, simply because it's a bitch to implement-- and assumes that the player is "speaking" in grammatically-correct, properly spelled sentences (and even then, it's a crap-shoot). Not to mention the difficulties of culture clash.
I'm guessing that the first generation of console MMOGs are either going to be fairly simple, or extremely late. Using PC MMOGs (Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, EverQuest, any number of MUDs) as an example, the more complex these titles are, the buggier they're going to be; if every current and next-gen console was packing a hard drive, this wouldn't be much of a problem-- just download the current patch, and *presto*!
Bear in mind, that despite the fact that they're less of a network hit than Q3 or UT, these games are still hellishly laggy on a dialup connection-- the average MMORPG server has between 500 and 2500 people on at any given point in time; even if everything is calculated on the client side (and it's doubtful that it will be), there's going to be a whole mess of jerking, popping, and stuttering on-screen-- which is something that a lot of console gamers just aren't going to put up with.
Here's a question that the console manufacturers haven't even begun to answer adequately: how do you connect? SEGA has SEGANet, but will that be the only allowed DC provider? What will Sony do? Who will own the server hardware for these games?
And, perhaps most importantly, how will console gamers react to a monthly subscription fee?
I wasn't aware of that; then again, I wasn't accusing the States' gov't of anything. One way or the other, the "Dream Team" was definitely a nail in the Olympic coffin... regardless of who was actually at fault for it.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Olympics must be stopped. I'm tired of the IOC's antics, the increasingly disturbing lack of anything resembling amateur sport in the games, and the out-and-out commoditization of the games.
I just about puked when I saw the basketball "Dream Team" a few years ago. The increasing pervasiveness of performance enhancing drugs (Ben Johnson, "Ma's Army", etc.), followed closely by the increasing number of Olympic-sized egos have permanently turned me off the games.
I want the UN to purchase the rights to the Games, and sit on them. Anyone can come up with their own version of the games, and the IOC is free to keep running them-- the catch is, the Olympic names, trademarks, etc., cannot be used. Let's see how long it takes people to tune out when the knee-jerk "Olympics are Important!" reflex is taken out of the equation.
Blech-- please define "value". My first AGP card was a (gods forbid) ATI Xpert@Play 4mb POS. That bloody thing was absolutely useless-- crappy drivers, driver "upgrades" that wouldn't install, and virtually no native support for anything. Hell, even the ATI-branded copy of Mechwarrior 2 didn't play worth a damn. I had to slap a Voodoo 1 in there (this was about the time that Voodoo 2 SLI jobs were popular) to do *anything*, and I eventually dropped $200 CDN on a Voodoo 3.
Granted, I've got an All in Wonder 128 in my new box as a secondary card. But that's because I'm too cheap to get a nice Matrox board. Besides, it does what I want it to-- video in and video out. For anything serious, I have my GeForce 256, and a Creative Dxr3 card.
I never thought that I'd see the day that ATI beat 3dFX. Especially considering that the Radeon is definitely not "all that and a bag of chips" (so to speak), despite what ATI's engineers and marketing teams might like us to believe.
Frankly, this is the same sort of silliness that infests the minds of people who think that they can actually get rich quick on a tech IPO. Repeat after me: "There is nothing inherently innovative about the market."
A company wants to stick you with a POS machine for three years. In return, you get to pay them to use their ISP (at a perhaps slightly reduced rate), *and* you're a captive audience for their banner ads, spam, and physical junk mail. The only innovation here is that they've figured out how to snag more suckers.
Look at the music industry (god, how that phrase catches in my throat-- "idustrialized creativity" *brr*) for a short moment. Instead of jumping all over the 'net as a cost-reducing transport for their product, they're just jumping all over the 'net. They don't want to innovate, they want to keep things as they've been for the last several decades.
No-one is interested in innovation anymore. All they want is some asinine new angle (read::cuecat) to sell to investors, and to patent to death (read: one-click). They come up with a minor idea, and hope to get a free ride on its coattails when its popularity "inevitably" takes off.
Of course, a lot of these organizations will be utterly screwed if the public ever smartens up. Selling expensive hardware as a loss leader is an extraordinarily risky move, and everyone should expect these organizations to either vanish or declare bankruptcy several months after they appear.
I think that AOL and Time-Warner are hoping to use the "legitimacy" of a US-backed merger (and the US gov't.) to strongarm the EC. Hell, for all we really know, the only reason that the EC is so dead-set against this, is because AOL and TW simply haven't thrown enough money at them yet...
The problem is that a lot of people don't understand, recognize, or appreciate after-sale mechanisms. They buy the hardware or the software, and expect it to be theirs to do with as they wish. "Sale" suggests a permanent transfer of ownership, after all.
I know a lot of people who won't go in for something like the TiVo, the:CueCat, or one of those monthly subscription online games, simply because they don't want to be continually paying for something that they've already bought. It's not like they're leasing a car, or anything.
Personally, I don't mind post-sale revenue mechanisms-- so long as they involve an optional, value-added service. If I buy a TiVo (at whatever price), it should be able to function as a simple digital VCR without being hooked up to the phone line. Sure, I lose out on a lot of the functionality, but it still works as a basic digital VCR.
The biggest problem is, a lot of these companies are just trying to make a quick-and-dirty buck off of the consumer, and there are a lot of people smart enough not to fall for it, and to work around it. A lot of these companies are jumping on this framework in the same way that everyone and their duck jumped on the dot.com and IPO bandwagon-- and a lot of them are going to get screwed, regardless of any improprieties on the part of the consumer.
To be honest, I consider it more of a "devolution". The early graphical adventure games were simply text adventures with graphical backdrops. The parser was still text (or mimicked text, in the case of the Lucasarts games), it's just the descriptions that were more visual.
Later iterations of graphical adventures have sacrificed their complexity for ease of use. A typical Sierra graphical adventure game has a set of perhaps seven mouse-icons (representing actions from "look" to "use") which can be clicked on an object or piece of scenery, or a short combination thereof. This has led to their games becoming little more than clickfests-- if you're stuck, just "use" everything in your inventory on anything in the scenery window. That has led to the absolutely ridiculous "puzzles" that we've seen in the later Sierra adventure games (Gabriel Knight 3 being a prime example). Similarly, reaction times and "pixel hunts" have become even more popular: King's Quest VII includes several "puzzles" in which the player must click upon an arbitrary location within a short period of time, or die.
It's kind of ironic that Lucasarts has abandoned this "evolutionary" path, with the production of Grim Fandango and the upcoming Monkey Island 4. It's amazing just how many people refuse to play a game that doesn't use the mouse. The characters react to the movement keys, with none of this effete pathfinding stuff. Usable items and locations are discovered when the character passes close by, eliminating the ages-old "flail the cursor until something highlights" schtick.
So what's Sierra done recently, to push the adventure genre further? Fake mustaches for disguises that shouldn't need them, and Masonic handshakes. Oh, yeah, and the shooter known as King's Quest VIII.
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that the "PGL" is a load of horseshit. I mean, they're glorifying the twitch reflex, and the ability to run a flipping maze. Given the hardware that these guys are using, and the time that they've thrown into becoming "l33t", I could probably kick ass with the best of them.
Jesus H. Christ, Thresh and Co. are merely older and slicker versions of Thor Ackerlund (or whatever the name of the once-famous "Nintendo Wizard" was). If anyone offered me a million dollars or a Ferrari in return for showing off my Diablo II skillz, I'd have to make sure that he wasn't carrying any sharp objects, and then get myself away from the lunatic as fast as possible.
I don't think that I'll be very impressed with "Frag". I mean, does the computer gaming "community" really need its own half-assed answer to the "Trekkies" documentary?
Ugh. Suggesting that geeks are Mage-style wonderworkers strikes me as being about as self-serving and arrogant as that whole SCAdians=faeries subtext that Changeling is steeped in. But enough of my opinions.
Where's the rest of the article? I mean, we've got a fairly obvious beginning paragraph, and the middle is definitely there, but if there's a conclusion, it must be hiding in the Shadow World that M. Katz keeps going on about.
Oh, and for the love of Eris, it's "Shadowrun," not "Shadowrunner."
This sounds a lot like the company involved is looking to shaft everyone who may or may not be involved in a similar project. They give you an interview, and you agree to the NDA. If you accept the position, you're okay (until you want to move on, that is); if you don't (or they decline your application), you're fucked. You can't go on to work for a different company in a similar capacity (and rest assured that they will be keeping some sort of tabs on you)-- which reduces every other company's available resource pool for similar projects.
Personally, I'm waiting for this whole NDA crap to get seriously abused, and dragged kicking and screaming out into the open. I mean, sooner or later, someone's going to be forced to sign an NDA over something as asinine as simple markup programming; this person will be fired; this person will be hired by another firm (again, for simple markup programming); both the person and his/her new firm will be sued by the original, NDA-wielding company for "IP theft" or another panic-button charge.
What spirit of the games? Let me spell it out for you, folks-- the Olympics are broken.
From stunts like the Salt Lake City bribes, to that "Dream Team" basketball garbage of several years back, to the simple fact that the participants are "amateurs" only by dint of not being directly paid for their talents (yet), the Games have shifted from being a celebration of worldwide athleticism to a cash cow of Biblical proportions.
An acquaintance of mine could have been on the Canadian biathlon team-- but for one problem: money. You see, biathletes are (or at least were) required to spend a gawdsawful amount of money on specially designed rifles. He couldn't afford it (he was quoted around 20-25k CDN), and even if he could find a sponsor, he would have considered it unethical.
My solution to everything Olympic? Shut it down completely. Disband the IOC, and have a hypothetical third party purchase the Olympic trademarks (to prevent their use). Granted, at least a half-dozen competing "worldwide games" would sprout up immediately, but none of them could hide their pretense behind the skirts of Olympic tradition.
Actually, something like this happened about a year ago, when Gamepower had to shut its MAME archive down. None of the companies were making money off of the old coin-op games, but "updated" versions of some of the games were released later (Frogger and Centipede leap readily to mind).
The point is, while these ROMS are running around, there's less incentive for Sega customers to shell out for updated/repackaged "Classics" or "Compilations" or "Oh, God, Remember This?"
Then came Laser Quest Academy (and its feculent relatives), and everything started to slide. Soundtracks released before the movie, as you mentioned (as an aside, when was the last time that anyone saw a symphonic soundtrack released?), that may have music that was actually in the film. Wasted-paper novel tie-ins for everything from Unreal to I Know What You Did Last Summer (gawd, what a hateful film-- little yuppie spawn literally trying to get away with murder. Spent the movie rooting for the "bad" guy). It's not like many people bother to read, anymore.
Then there's the movie "industry"-- dredging up everything from Lost in Space to effing Les Miserables in an obscene attempt to squeeze "safe" and "successful" money out of long-dead cultural icons.
Christ, I must be getting old. I just found myself wishing for the "good old days." Anyone else remember the days when everything wasn't just a cheap knock-off of everything else?
Slashdot Mirror
At least once a month, for three months, I received an e-mail from Simutronics, advertising AT&T and another of their games. There was a remove-from-list link at the bottom of the e-mail, which I always clicked on, to no avail. I ranted and threatened, to no avail. Luckily, the fools had left the brass' e-mail addresses stashed away on their company web-pages... so I e-mailed the head of their Marketing department, explaining exactly why I would never play another Simutronics game, use an AT&T service, and encourage everyone that I met to do the same.
Within three days, he confirmed that I was off the list.
With an outfit like Amazon, your best bet is to get an e-mail program that can handle filters. Just set it up to delete anything that comes down the pipe from Amazon, and you're all set-- until your friends sign up for their AmazonMail e-mail addresses.
Seriously speaking, though, I've gone through enough shitty pre-built machines that I only purchase parts piecemeal. A mobo here, a case there... and a brand-spanking-new HD that came directly from the wholesaler to me, shrink-wrapped and all.
I found my old copy a while ago, but I'm afraid that it doesn't run very well on a Celery 466...
That reminds me-- a friend of mine was e-mailing copies of Sextris (Tetris, only the bricks are people in odd positions-- you get the idea) to friends and relatives. Nothing unusual about that of course, crudity being one of e-mail's primary purposes. The funny thing in this case, was that the damn thing had been infected by a virus (Green Caterpillar, I think-- he's had recurring problems with that one for close to ten years now); we're still trying to decide if it was sexually transmitted or not. Of course, now he surfs for pr0n with a condom pulled over his cable modem, just in case.
In this case, I was eating a Pogo, when my group was attacked. Now, for those of you who don't know, the opening of a combat sequence in LoL causes force-feedback joysticks to shake like a rat in a terrier's jaws. Of course, I've got the Pogo in my mouth, and the Dual Shock controller leaps out of my hand... directly into my lap. The sensation was quite different than what I had come to expect from using a Playstation. Luckily (or not), I haven't had a similar experience with a Dual-Shock controller since.
Prove to me that spam does anything beyond annoying the recipient. I have informed several otherwise "legitimate" companies that that their incessant unsolicited e-mails have caused me to boycott their products, and to encourage everyone that I meet to do so as well.
Demographic profiling? Please-- I receive at least five "spam" e-mails per day, detailing how I can "now accept credit cards". I don't run a business. I have never ran a business. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be dealing with an organization that relied upon a fly-by-night mass-emailing company to advertise themselves.
Define "new", as in "spam is simply a derogatory term for a new form of advertising". I've been running into spam for a number of years now, and especially when one thinks in terms of "internet time", spam is by no means new.
If spammers of all sorts were seriously interested in legitimizing their "business", all advertising or soliciting messages would be preceded by an "ADV:" marker. Likewise, all spam would have a functional opt-out link embedded somewhere within the message. Your claims of "demographic profiling" are laughable-- the vast majority of mass e-mailers utilize hacked and/or harvested e-mail addresses. When I receive a message that is sent to j*@home.com, I'd say that it's abundantly clear that the sender has no interest in my demographic profile.
Granted, there are similarities to accepted unsolicited mass-contact schemes, such as "junk" mail and telemarketing-- both of which are generally reviled, I might add. The difference in this case, is that junk e-mail takes up precious space on mail-servers; unlike the post office or the phone company, ISPs are not being paid for this abuse of their services and hardware.
You want people to accept spam? Legitimize it first-- make the spammers accountable.
In passing, please be careful with your gross over-generalizations. I do not operate within your "capitalist economy", nor do others who post on or read Slashdot. Complaining about spam does not make me a hypocrite.
If my friends want me to try MSN Explorer, they can tell me to my face. That way I can laugh in theirs immediately afterwards.
I cannot believe that these idiots are trying to claim that it isn't spam. It's auto-generated; it's ad-copy; and it's offensive to one's intelligence. What's next-- a .sig that reads "This e-mail generated by Outlook Express. Click "here" for details"?
I've heard rumours that the new Metroid is supposed to played from a first-person perspective. I can't speak for anyone else, but something that amounts to a Samus Quake mod just doesn't float my boat.
The last I heard, this thing was 4x4x6-- it's frigging tiny. No word on the size of the (Fisher-Price inspired) controller-- which seems to be designed not to fit in an adult hand properly.
Personally, I'd have used a front-loading CD-cartridge design, myself. If they're intending for the user to truck it around wherever, that flip-top is a damn bad idea.
And why on Bob's green earth is the damn thing so fugly?
I'm not particularly excited about the idea of "real time translation" between "x" languages, simply because it's a bitch to implement-- and assumes that the player is "speaking" in grammatically-correct, properly spelled sentences (and even then, it's a crap-shoot). Not to mention the difficulties of culture clash.
I'm guessing that the first generation of console MMOGs are either going to be fairly simple, or extremely late. Using PC MMOGs (Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, EverQuest, any number of MUDs) as an example, the more complex these titles are, the buggier they're going to be; if every current and next-gen console was packing a hard drive, this wouldn't be much of a problem-- just download the current patch, and *presto*!
Bear in mind, that despite the fact that they're less of a network hit than Q3 or UT, these games are still hellishly laggy on a dialup connection-- the average MMORPG server has between 500 and 2500 people on at any given point in time; even if everything is calculated on the client side (and it's doubtful that it will be), there's going to be a whole mess of jerking, popping, and stuttering on-screen-- which is something that a lot of console gamers just aren't going to put up with.
Here's a question that the console manufacturers haven't even begun to answer adequately: how do you connect? SEGA has SEGANet, but will that be the only allowed DC provider? What will Sony do? Who will own the server hardware for these games?
And, perhaps most importantly, how will console gamers react to a monthly subscription fee?
I wasn't aware of that; then again, I wasn't accusing the States' gov't of anything. One way or the other, the "Dream Team" was definitely a nail in the Olympic coffin... regardless of who was actually at fault for it.
I just about puked when I saw the basketball "Dream Team" a few years ago. The increasing pervasiveness of performance enhancing drugs (Ben Johnson, "Ma's Army", etc.), followed closely by the increasing number of Olympic-sized egos have permanently turned me off the games.
I want the UN to purchase the rights to the Games, and sit on them. Anyone can come up with their own version of the games, and the IOC is free to keep running them-- the catch is, the Olympic names, trademarks, etc., cannot be used. Let's see how long it takes people to tune out when the knee-jerk "Olympics are Important!" reflex is taken out of the equation.
My pants just suffered a GPF!
Granted, I've got an All in Wonder 128 in my new box as a secondary card. But that's because I'm too cheap to get a nice Matrox board. Besides, it does what I want it to-- video in and video out. For anything serious, I have my GeForce 256, and a Creative Dxr3 card.
I never thought that I'd see the day that ATI beat 3dFX. Especially considering that the Radeon is definitely not "all that and a bag of chips" (so to speak), despite what ATI's engineers and marketing teams might like us to believe.
A company wants to stick you with a POS machine for three years. In return, you get to pay them to use their ISP (at a perhaps slightly reduced rate), *and* you're a captive audience for their banner ads, spam, and physical junk mail. The only innovation here is that they've figured out how to snag more suckers.
Look at the music industry (god, how that phrase catches in my throat-- "idustrialized creativity" *brr*) for a short moment. Instead of jumping all over the 'net as a cost-reducing transport for their product, they're just jumping all over the 'net. They don't want to innovate, they want to keep things as they've been for the last several decades.
No-one is interested in innovation anymore. All they want is some asinine new angle (read: :cuecat) to sell to investors, and to patent to death (read: one-click). They come up with a minor idea, and hope to get a free ride on its coattails when its popularity "inevitably" takes off.
Of course, a lot of these organizations will be utterly screwed if the public ever smartens up. Selling expensive hardware as a loss leader is an extraordinarily risky move, and everyone should expect these organizations to either vanish or declare bankruptcy several months after they appear.
I think that AOL and Time-Warner are hoping to use the "legitimacy" of a US-backed merger (and the US gov't.) to strongarm the EC. Hell, for all we really know, the only reason that the EC is so dead-set against this, is because AOL and TW simply haven't thrown enough money at them yet...
I know a lot of people who won't go in for something like the TiVo, the :CueCat, or one of those monthly subscription online games, simply because they don't want to be continually paying for something that they've already bought. It's not like they're leasing a car, or anything.
Personally, I don't mind post-sale revenue mechanisms-- so long as they involve an optional, value-added service. If I buy a TiVo (at whatever price), it should be able to function as a simple digital VCR without being hooked up to the phone line. Sure, I lose out on a lot of the functionality, but it still works as a basic digital VCR.
The biggest problem is, a lot of these companies are just trying to make a quick-and-dirty buck off of the consumer, and there are a lot of people smart enough not to fall for it, and to work around it. A lot of these companies are jumping on this framework in the same way that everyone and their duck jumped on the dot.com and IPO bandwagon-- and a lot of them are going to get screwed, regardless of any improprieties on the part of the consumer.
Later iterations of graphical adventures have sacrificed their complexity for ease of use. A typical Sierra graphical adventure game has a set of perhaps seven mouse-icons (representing actions from "look" to "use") which can be clicked on an object or piece of scenery, or a short combination thereof. This has led to their games becoming little more than clickfests-- if you're stuck, just "use" everything in your inventory on anything in the scenery window. That has led to the absolutely ridiculous "puzzles" that we've seen in the later Sierra adventure games (Gabriel Knight 3 being a prime example). Similarly, reaction times and "pixel hunts" have become even more popular: King's Quest VII includes several "puzzles" in which the player must click upon an arbitrary location within a short period of time, or die.
It's kind of ironic that Lucasarts has abandoned this "evolutionary" path, with the production of Grim Fandango and the upcoming Monkey Island 4. It's amazing just how many people refuse to play a game that doesn't use the mouse. The characters react to the movement keys, with none of this effete pathfinding stuff. Usable items and locations are discovered when the character passes close by, eliminating the ages-old "flail the cursor until something highlights" schtick.
So what's Sierra done recently, to push the adventure genre further? Fake mustaches for disguises that shouldn't need them, and Masonic handshakes. Oh, yeah, and the shooter known as King's Quest VIII.
Jesus H. Christ, Thresh and Co. are merely older and slicker versions of Thor Ackerlund (or whatever the name of the once-famous "Nintendo Wizard" was). If anyone offered me a million dollars or a Ferrari in return for showing off my Diablo II skillz, I'd have to make sure that he wasn't carrying any sharp objects, and then get myself away from the lunatic as fast as possible.
I don't think that I'll be very impressed with "Frag". I mean, does the computer gaming "community" really need its own half-assed answer to the "Trekkies" documentary?
Where's the rest of the article? I mean, we've got a fairly obvious beginning paragraph, and the middle is definitely there, but if there's a conclusion, it must be hiding in the Shadow World that M. Katz keeps going on about.
Oh, and for the love of Eris, it's "Shadowrun," not "Shadowrunner."
Am I the only one who thinks this guy is a Churchill wannabe? Firewalling my PC, indeed.
Personally, I'm waiting for this whole NDA crap to get seriously abused, and dragged kicking and screaming out into the open. I mean, sooner or later, someone's going to be forced to sign an NDA over something as asinine as simple markup programming; this person will be fired; this person will be hired by another firm (again, for simple markup programming); both the person and his/her new firm will be sued by the original, NDA-wielding company for "IP theft" or another panic-button charge.
From stunts like the Salt Lake City bribes, to that "Dream Team" basketball garbage of several years back, to the simple fact that the participants are "amateurs" only by dint of not being directly paid for their talents (yet), the Games have shifted from being a celebration of worldwide athleticism to a cash cow of Biblical proportions.
An acquaintance of mine could have been on the Canadian biathlon team-- but for one problem: money. You see, biathletes are (or at least were) required to spend a gawdsawful amount of money on specially designed rifles. He couldn't afford it (he was quoted around 20-25k CDN), and even if he could find a sponsor, he would have considered it unethical.
My solution to everything Olympic? Shut it down completely. Disband the IOC, and have a hypothetical third party purchase the Olympic trademarks (to prevent their use). Granted, at least a half-dozen competing "worldwide games" would sprout up immediately, but none of them could hide their pretense behind the skirts of Olympic tradition.
Not anymore: "I don't want to be free," says Information
The point is, while these ROMS are running around, there's less incentive for Sega customers to shell out for updated/repackaged "Classics" or "Compilations" or "Oh, God, Remember This?"
Then there's the movie "industry"-- dredging up everything from Lost in Space to effing Les Miserables in an obscene attempt to squeeze "safe" and "successful" money out of long-dead cultural icons.
Christ, I must be getting old. I just found myself wishing for the "good old days." Anyone else remember the days when everything wasn't just a cheap knock-off of everything else?